No, of course my parents have no idea what I’m doin’! How could they? They are, like, old. Dad’s pretty good with a PC as long as it’s Windows, and Mom, well, if it isn’t Word or Outlook or IE she’s, like, lost. Do you know she still closes each application when she wants to switch to another one?! It drives me nuts!

So what’s goin’ on? Well, for a start there’s our texting network. Me and my buds and their friends and their friends have set up a, you know, texting group using a cool Web service so when there’s a good party we can find out real easy where it is.

It’s really cool — you can get real-time messages via texting, IM or the Web! We’ve got all sorts of text codes for what’s going on, you know, like whether there’s beer, and even cooler is we all work together to track the cops and cover for each other. You need a ride ‘cause you’re wasted? Need a cover story for your parents? Me and my boys got you covered!

Actually this has become so freakin’ big we also set up a Web site. We call it DaHoodworks. My friend Bobby put it together ‘cause he runs the Web site for his Dad’s furniture business so he just set up a private section for us to use. His Dad hasn’t got a clue, and even if he finds something is going on, all the stuff we don’t want him or anyone else to know is encrypted anyway. It’s really cool. Bobby showed me how to use public key encryption.

Oh, and there’s our music club! We call it a club but it’s just a load of us who all know each other. There’s about 150 of us and if you aren’t cool and you don’t know someone who is “in” you’ll never find out about it.

We know all about those dweebs at the RIAA and we keep a low enough profile that they can go on picking on random grannies and unemployed single moms and never know what we’re doin’!

We swap the music, like, through our Web site, although we use a whole load of free services to make it happen. A lot of the sounds are bought from iTunes, but there’s also tons of new underground stuff that gets sent ‘round. Bobby’s friend Carl the Cableman (don’t ask why he’s called that) built a cool little database on some free service that we use to see what tracks are available — no, I don’t remember what the database is called — there’s a link on Hoodworks so you don’t need to remember.

It works like this: If a track isn’t in our stock (that’s what Frankie calls it) then someone buys it on iTunes and burns it to a CD, rips the CD back to MP3 and then updates the stock list and lets everyone know by texting that it’s available.

We use one of the free public file-transfer sites to, like, move the music around. It’s real easy. My collection is awesome — dude, my girlfriend couldn’t believe how much music I have my hands on.

I’m a little bummed out ‘cause Frankie started doin’ what he calls “warehousing” on the Web site for some friend of his. Frankie showed me what’s in the files he’s storing and it looks like credit card data. I saw our principal’s name and stuff in the file and I asked Frankie to take it out cause the principal is a pretty good guy. Frankie says he thinks his “customers” would find out and he doesn’t want to know what they’d do to him if that happened.

I get that but, dude, it, like, freaks me out a bit. I mean what if my parent’s credit stuff is in there?

Anyway Frankie says they’re paying him good money and he says that even if they rip off the principal’s credit card his insurance will cover it, so why should I care? He says he’ll cut me in so, whatever? Why not?

OK, well, I’ll add you to the texting system and I’ll give you the music club details tomorrow. Later dude.